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March is Women’s History Month, so it was a fitting assignment to take up for this publication since The Community Library was founded by seventeen women almost seventy years ago — women who created local history by founding a treasured valley cultural institution.
Women like Jeanne Rodger Lane Moritz, who arrived in Sun Valley in 1942 from Chicago and was an original founder of both the Gold Mine and the Library. Jeanne’s story will be one of those told in the Library’s soon to-be-launched Wood River Museum of History and Culture.
There has been bravery and strength throughout our history here, but remarkably so in the women of our valley, and it has been the Library’s focus and pleasure to ensure those stories get told in both our Regional History collection and in our new Museum.
I’ve thought back to my own experiences, wondering if bravery or boldness played any part in my own personal history. Perhaps not in the overarching way it did with our valley founders, but in a very small way I think of one incident. In 1970, our junior high dress code still prohibited girls from wearing pants to school. On colder days, those of us that walked to school would wear pants under our dresses that we would quickly take off when we got into the school building. I found this especially unfair since I had two older brothers that didn’t have to go through this ridiculous effort (and okay, wearing pants was hip and cool!). I talked with some other girls at school, and we organized a protest. On a chosen day we continued to wear our pants throughout the entire day. We were of course solemnly asked into the principal’s office to explain our behavior. We thought ourselves to be very brave and strong.
But this modest episode of professed bravery pales after spending some time in the oral history archives of the Library’s Center for Regional History. I didn’t need to get past the first interview: Alta Horton Ellis, who was the daughter of the first forest service official in the Wood River and Sawtooth valleys. She reflected on her childhood summers living at the Pole Creek Ranger Station, where at the age of ten she was allowed to ride her horse, alone, six miles through the forest to the store at Galena once each week so she could buy a candy bar.
Then there is Charlotte Howard Rice’s recollections of women’s roles as homemaker, ranch hand, farmer and provider, where women handled the horse team at haying, made soap, cooked for all the ranch hands (including the weeks’ long process of making sausage), and tended to the children.
And how joyful to hear Lucille Hathaway Hall’s musing, after recounting that she carried a 30-30 Winchester rifle and a six-shooter fitted into her chaps: “If I’m going to take a boy’s place, why can’t I wear my brother’s pants?”.
My girlfriends and I were standing on the shoulders of these and other extraordinary women who broke barriers and helped pave the way for women’s rights.
We hardly seem brave compared to a woman who wore pants and chaps while herding sheep with her six-shooter in central Idaho in the 1920s! But every step, even small ones, makes a difference.
These stories are but a tiny introduction to the Library’s collection of over 500 oral histories. A contemporary story that will be featured in our new Wood River Museum of History and Culture is the story of Rosmery Serva. As a restaurant entrepreneur, Rosmery continues to create local history — one of the many intrepid women who have started and are running a local business.
In her oral history Charlotte Rice observed: “Women had courage then just the same as they do now.”
As we say at the Library, we all make history, and the women of the Wood River Valley continue that tradition of courage, and are creating history every day.
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